Ulverton Read online

  ‘I’d rather bide at home, sir. That’s all.’

  The crowd’s titters grew into chuckles. The young men in the line shifted from foot to foot, grinning.

  ‘I see,’ said the Squire. He looked about him, as if for aid. People averted their eyes – myself included. He began to glower. He was grappling with himself; it was painful to watch. It was, in some profound way, embarrassing.

  ‘Yes. I see. He would rather stay at home. Yes. I see. What? Well, if a man would rather stay at home, then who are we to stop him, what? What? Thank you, Cullurne.’

  Bare reportage cannot convey the deep hatred sometimes evinced between men through the simplest address. The words of the Squire were more spat out than spoken. The crowd murmured. Cullurne turned and walked away, and every eye followed his long strides, every heart beat to his steady rhythm – until each step became no more than a faint echo, dwindling to silence through the empty lanes.

  Activity broke out again in the square: the crowd began to disperse into small knots, the young men gave their names to a dapper clerk who had suddenly appeared from the side of the crowd, the hoops rattled and a green-liveried automobile roared to a stop outside the Post Office and diverted everyone’s attention. It was the Major’s. When I looked above it, at the eaves, I saw nothing. The house-martin had gone.

  It was not I who chose Ulverton as the ‘happy spot’ for my final innings; it was the skein of family connections that pulled me to this place. My wife’s second cousin, Mrs Mary Holland, had lived in the village for almost all her married life; although her husband was long dead by the time I settled here, she was so enamoured of the place in which she had brought up her family, that she had vowed to stay on and not retire, as was the wont then, to a widow’s decline in Weymouth. Our friendship began through tragedy: having lost her darling son, Daniel, to influenza in his first term at Eton in the same year as my own brother was appointed housemaster there, in 1886, relationships were established more closely than would otherwise have been the case, for the stricken mother needed all the support we could give her; mine being of the post-marked variety, until my leave gave us the opportunity to visit her in 1893. I well remember the carriage mounting that last hill north of Ulverton, cresting the bare, nibbled flanks of Frum Down, and giving us all of a sudden that enchanted view of the verdant river, the clustering trees, the black thatch of ancient roofs and the simple grey stone of the church, that bespoke all our exiled dreams, and seemed to embody all our fairest fancies! Apart from the odd straggling copse, and the neat lushness of Ulverton House, all about was naked and desolate, even repellent (how ignorant I was then of the springy exhilaration of our bare downland!) – but this only served to heighten the charms of this remote village. We were stricken by love, and vowed to make this ‘our’ England on the final return from India. Alas, our plans were only half-realised, as it were: dashed by dysentery and death – and sometimes I find the association dreadful in my solitude; Mrs Holland too now lying beside her husband and her son near the Saxon yew of our secluded churchyard, their tombstone recording their allotted spans only a little less mutely than the grassy mounds of the labouring generations, whose stones are as bereft of art as their lives.

  When I am depressed in spirits I play Chopin. I am famous for this: my cottage being on the main street, facing the high flint wall of the churchyard, the open windows of summer mean that any passing souls are vexed by my missed notes, or stirred by my harmonies. On that day, that August day fourteen years ago, as the thirty-two young men of Ulverton clambered aboard the bus and waved their proud farewells, and were trotted out of sight, to some distant and unimaginable vista, each dressed as if for a church outing, or a visit to town with their beloveds, I played my heart out. Mrs Holland sat by the window and listened, tears welling in her eyes through the B Minor Sonata, as the cries of the young men sounded in the street, their younger siblings shrieked and whistled, their mothers and fathers waved and kissed and blew their noses, and the bus momentarily darkened the room as it passed.

  ‘It will only be a small affair,’ said Mrs Holland. ‘My dear husband used to play this.’

  I said nothing and played on.

  Ulverton had more volunteers than any other village on the downs. The rhetorical flourish with the sabre had played its part, for everyone said how ‘the Squire hev done us proud, then.’ I continued to work shoulder to shoulder with the men he had forbidden to attend the meeting. At least, that is how I interpreted their absence. In the way of things here, no one questioned this privilege, because no one saw it as such; believe it or not, those lucky few with their noses to the chalk were seen as exhibiting extreme unselfishness. They were making their sacrifice for the sake of knowledge and discovery. The talk of treasure-hunts dwindled in the tap-rooms of Ulverton. That healthy air of ruefulness which I had so valued in the English countryman and countrywoman evaporated in those early months of the war: loins were girded, and spines stiffened, and the deadlier face of patriotism shown, in a way I found thoroughly alarming.

  There was only one pariah, one Untouchable, in our pastoral haven – and that was Percy Cullurne. ‘Craven’ was the least insulting, and the most printable, of the many qualifications made upon his good name that summer and autumn. He, in his turn, lapsed into near silence, seeming not to feel the sting of the verbal sticks and stones, and the odd scrawled contribution to fellow-feeling upon his cottage door, and the various small missiles aimed at him by the dwarf regiments, goaded on by their zealous parents. It might have turned out otherwise: a hundred years earlier, he would no doubt have been the hero of the hour, carried shoulder-high around a burning rick. But the vans of Socialism, odious though they were, had only trundled ineffectually through our village by 1914: perhaps owing to the memories of the older folk, still vivid, of the terrible results of rebellion, and a general relieving of hardship and poverty, there was little connection made between the ranting from the vans and the famous last words of John Oadam [alias ‘Captain Bedwine’ of the ballads – see The Book of Downland Songs, 1923]; little attempt to relate the tenets of the placarded strangers with the fenced-off woods and the touched cap, that deference as ingrained as the soil in the furrows of their hands.

  Not that the members of the ‘team’ were happy with this arrangement – I mean, their enforced sacrifice. I don’t want to give the impression that they were burning to be off into foreign parts, and slaughter the Hun: no, it was far more owing to an uncomfortable sense of exclusiveness; a coat that carries well in Pall Mall, but not amongst the labouring brethren of rural England. Exclusiveness, or difference, without material satisfaction – that is too close to the outsider complex. Every aside in the Half Moon, or the Malt Shovel, or the Green Man, or the New Inn; every little silence at their leaving; every knowing smile or wink in the lane; each military or patriotic reference in the Harvest Home songs of that summer’s end; every slow, laborious reading-out of the newspaper before the assembled family or the tap-room company became a jab, a prod, not just to the conscience but to that feeling of belonging so essential to the otherwise lonely human animal. Our village was more full of eccentrics then than now, but even the most awry of minds was inextricably woven into the common fabric, just as the trees in the wood grow more individual the more familiar one becomes with the mass. Matters have changed: our great roads are thronged with motor-cars and lorries, the wireless tinkles, the telephone connects us with far-away towns. Ulverton is slowly losing its sense of remoteness; each day brings the world nearer, darkening my room with its passing, pruning us of our odder growths, blowing away the strong rich scents that come of stagnation. The nearest high scarp is no longer the edge of the world, and heads barely turn when the toot of a motor-car sounds at Church Corner. Is this to be regretted? Time, dear reader, shall arbitrate upon that question – not I.

  Let us remain with that group of men huddled upon the high hills of chalky England in the late summer of 1914: let us try to imagine their position, and feel their d
iscomfort: let us equate it with our own moments in life, when someone has done something that reflects a light back upon us, in which we are uncomfortably exposed to our conscience, and to the imagined grievances of others. Then in the penultimate week of August the bell tolled a death-knell; and slow and dull and remorseless it sounded across the downs. Each man cocked an ear, paused in his delicate work. A far shout from a stubbled field, and a cart rocking with its corn-load stopped. Two great whirring reapers in a field below us plodded on, their magnificent harnessed teams oblivious to human misfortunes – but the drivers turned in their seats to look down at the village, and the women paused by their stooks, lifting their bonnets to gaze. Tiny figures were to be seen hurtling up various tracks, childish shrills sounded, the harvesters in the fields came together in knots and dispersed, and soon enough Sidney Bint, the baker’s small boy, came panting up the side of the mound, and the name of Jimmy Tuck resounded shrilly over our little scooped world. A pale lad with a stutter who had done me some service by mending the stone outhouse roof at the bottom of my garden – making of it a study wherein I sit now, in the scent of buddleia, just as I did then through those golden evenings – Jimmy Tuck died at Maubeuge on August 21st, blown apart by an artillery shell.

  We all turned to the Squire as the lad stood there, panting, apparently exhilarated by the effect his words had had. Another boy popped up beside him, swore softly at being beaten to it, put his hand on his friend’s shoulder, and looked down at us with equal anticipation. I felt for a moment as though I was on a stage, in an ancient theatre, where ritual grief sounded after ritual murder. We were looking to the Squire as if he were the salvatory King, as if he might raise his arms, and open his throat, and wail for all of us. Instead, he reached into his waistcoat pocket and took out two pennies, flicked them to the boys (who scampered off down Louzy Hill, shrieking at their good fortune), scratched his forehead, and indicated with his trowel that we should continue – and nothing more was said for the rest of the day, bar the odd ‘poor bugger’ murmured into the chalk. I felt now as if I were at a tea-party where a guest had loudly broken wind; where some rule had been broken and custom breached by the unforeseen – and no one was quite sure what to do about it.

  So it was not unexpected when Marlers stood up at the end of a day’s excavation and announced that this was to be his last week. His leggings were white with chalk; his face was streaked like a clown’s. He said that Jimmy Tuck’s mother looked at him funny, that the nips looked at him funny, that the whole universe, in effect, was looking at ‘awld Marlers funny’. I had indeed looked at him, I must say, with a wry internal grin since our first encounter, when he had come to advise on the contents of my greenhouse, and I had displayed the newcomer’s unerring ability to try too hard. ‘Ah, good morning Mr Marlow, come in,’ said I. ‘My name en’t Marlow,’ came the lugubrious reply, ‘it be Trevick.’ Why ‘Marlers’ I have not been able to discover. Not that it matters now: how many bright appendages are lost, how many quirks and tics that make up the human sum of personality slip beneath the earth, when faceless Death strikes!

  Back on the barrow, the Squire blanched a little at this news. ‘It’s your decision,’ he said. He could have said little else, in the circumstances. Ernest, whom he was consulting at that minute, sucked on a pencil.

  ‘Duty,’ said Marlers, glancing at the others, who were wiping their trowels on the soft tussocks. ‘You talked of duty at the meetin’, so we understand. That’s why all our young lads have gone. You an’ your sword from Waterloo, sir.’

  ‘Yes,’ said the Squire, looking down. ‘Of course. Duty.’

  Ernest began to flick through his drawings. Urns, shards, an iron hair-pin, yesterday’s broken beaker impressed with a comb in crude diamond-shaped patterns. Nothing of significance or value.

  ‘Yes. Of course. Duty.’

  Marlers, Allun the chauffeur, Terence Brinn, and wheezy but no doubt formidable Tom Sedgwick – all left at the end of the week. Ernest stayed, of course – as well as Dart, nostrils quivering like a horse, content with his stupidity. The Squire was devastated, and consoled himself by shooting pigeons for a week in Bailey’s Wood – while the barrow was left under canvas wraps. A month of disappointing finds had taken its toll, and now war had interrupted his long-held ambition (this is how I now interpreted it) to take possession of an ancient treasure.

  Sometime during this week of idleness, Ernest called round and (in between taking sips of tea with his tongue-tip protruded, like a cat at its milk) explained to me the various stages through which the barrow had passed before resting content with tussocks and butterflies and the odd rustic rump for four thousand or so years. His enthusiasm was tempered by the possibility that our Chief had lost interest. This was, he claimed, a sign of the amateur.

  ‘Though, of course, I cannot, um, blame him. Of course.’

  I nodded. His moustache was wiped free of tea and malt biscuit and he spread out a diagram on the table between us.

  ‘Here,’ he said, pointing to a large oblong ringing the welter of circles and crosses; ‘here is the latest burial-phase. A ditch dug around the mound in which, um, we have found evidence of burial by cremation. The discoloration of the soil is probably due to the rotting of wooden stakes surrounding the most recent, um, mound phase.’

  He paused. I was impressed.

  ‘From previous expeditions which I have been party to I predict that, um, an earlier phase will yield something much more exciting.’

  ‘Why should it?’

  He smiled.

  ‘The initial justification for such a sizeable mound,’ he replied, in a triumphant tone befitting the Assistant Secretary of our county’s Archaeological Society. His moustache quivered at my quizzical look. ‘Our finds up to now, um, these recent finds – they were simply additions. And cremation is, I believe, associated with later centuries. If we continue, I confidently predict that, um, we will uncover a rich burial, uncremated, with grave-goods to match. It might take many weeks, but I am sure it will be, um, worth it.’

  I sat back and pondered his assertions while he lapped his tea. In actual fact, I was hardly bothered one way or another. With such recent memories of my wife’s last illness, I was growing averse to finding anything at all, if it meant uncovering something so manifestly morbid. To reveal the dead is not to release them.

  ‘I see. But with whom? Dart? He’s more a liability than a help. He still believes the trowel is his hammer and the chalk the anvil, if I’m not mistaken. He would smash the skull before we saw it. I say we should enlist some female support, but the Chief is dead agin it, needless to say.’

  Ernest laughed – giggled would be a better description. The Chief’s misogyny was the best known fact about him – the oft-given explanation of his bachelor state, accompanied with an apparent unconcern at the inevitable withering of the Norcoat-Wells tree.

  ‘Yes, there’s the problem. Um, I’ve often wondered why the under-gardener hasn’t joined us. He’s, um, very strong.’

  ‘Percy Cullurne?’

  ‘Yes.’

  I sighed. ‘That man has strong opinions of his own. As you saw – or rather, would have seen, at the meeting.’

  ‘I heard, yes,’ he said, flushing a little at this somewhat oblique reproval. ‘But what are these opinions? Concerning the excavation, I mean.’ He coughed and blew his nose, in case I had forgotten about his weakly constitution. ‘He never,’ he added, ‘says very much.’

  ‘That’s partly because the Squire has forbidden him to do so. Button your lip, he was told, apparently. Too much talk of treasure. So that is what Cullurne has done, in toto. I have had several most fruitful discussions with him on ornithological and botanical matters, as well as other more general concerns, such as the survival of the soul after death. Now it is exceedingly difficult to extract the shortest of sentences from him, unless you are talking of the weather, or the crops, or such like. And that in an almost impenetrable dialect, which was not the case before.’r />
  ‘Ah,’ Ernest nodded, and wiped his moustache with the corner of his handkerchief. ‘Then we will have to work slowly. Or recruit others. Older men. A pity, a pity. Um, yourself excused, of course. The new chauffeur looks very, um, frail. And the harvest is at its height. Pray for a fine autumn.’

  After the Battle of the Marne, which raged through the first and second week of September, and in which our county regiment was not involved, the Germans dug in at the Aisne and trench warfare began. It was around then that my depressions returned. That week of enforced inaction though a spell of unusually hot weather, joined with a certain emptiness about the village heart, and the sight of a small girl outside the village shop weeping for her father ‘as goed off to fight on my birthday, an’ med never come back!’ – these played on my nerves, already as much frayed as my skin was by the many years of tropical sun. A colonial servant is instantly recognisable by his bleached and desiccated hair, his prematurely lined face, the hand-shake from repeated bouts of fever, and frequently (not, I am happy to add, in my case) the redolence of alcoholic addiction. His wife will be a mirror image, if wispier throughout, and with eyes dazed by monsoon-boredom and the company of dolts. Dark moods are an occupational hazard, even more so when these husks return to their mother-country, and find her erring on the side of dampness rather than coolness, as well as changed for the worse – always changed for the worse. The great wheels of the Empire, though in my opinion faltering now, grind her servants as effectively as they do her coffee-beans, but with far less substance to the end product. They are somehow emptied of anything but a kind of bitter regret, as if true happiness had only just eluded them in the middle of blinding squares or on the netted verandahs. How much happier that man who remains in his birthplace, and does not take the horizon as his gate to contentment!